Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows arrives as the second entry in a franchise already remade once, and it carries itself with the cheerful incuriosity of a Saturday morning cartoon handed a nine-figure budget. Dave Green directs a plot about Shredder, a teleportation device, an alien warlord named Krang, and a machine destined to open a portal above New York. The cast is notably multiethnic, with Tyler Perry, Brian Tee, Brittany Ishibashi and Gary Anthony Williams filling out the villain roster. None of this is presented as a statement. The faces simply exist, do their jobs, and the film moves on. That is not a criticism. It is a description.

The film offers a woman as a capable reporter and another as the chief of police, and neither is framed as a thesis. Donatello builds the gadgets because he is the smart brother, which is a character trait, not a diagnosis. There is no romantic or identity subtext of any kind, no environmental sermon, no economic grievance. The antagonists are an alien and a clan of ninjas, not plutocrats, and the film has no interest in who owns what. Its moral universe extends to the importance of family and the value of teamwork, delivered in the gaps between pratfalls and property damage.

Across the board, the film resists classification. It is loud, silly, and mercifully free of instruction. It was a box office disappointment, and the studio later confessed it could not explain the indifference. We can. It asked nothing of the audience beyond attention, and in 2016 that was apparently no longer sufficient. A third installment was scrapped in favor of an animated reboot, which tells you everything about the market's appetite for a movie that simply wanted to be fun.